“You dropped them right in front of me! And that is a nine, you’re looking at it upside down, here give it to me-”

“No!”

“Jesus, you’re an idiot!”

That was two words she would get punished for, and Jonas looked eagerly at his mother, but a strange thing had happened: his mother was crying. The children withdrew into themselves, frightened, and Cynthia tried hard to stop frightening them, but it was not so easy.

“Sorry,” she said to them.

“It’s okay,” April said reflexively.

“Yeah,” Jonas said-and then, fishing up from his kindergarten experience a sentence he’d been taught for the purpose of conflict resolution, but had never actually used, he said, “What game would you like to play?”

When they were sweet like that you had to go with it right away, you had to do or say something, or else they’d really see you cry. So Cynthia said, “I want to play poker.”

“Poker?” April said, wrinkling her nose for comic effect. She’d seen some mischief in her mother’s face, something that promised a return to form, and she tried to draw it out. “How do you play?”

“Well, there’s a bunch of different ways, but I’ll teach you an easy one. Go get that big bowl of change off Daddy’s dresser.” She began shuffling and bridging, which the kids loved. Counting out equal stacks of pennies, dimes, nickels, and quarters killed a good amount of time, long enough for Cynthia to feel herself out of danger.

She taught them to play five-card draw, and when they had the hang of it-one pair, two pair, three of a kind-she introduced the betting. She dealt out a hand, and Jonas, fanning out his cards, put his fist in the air and yelled “Yes!”

“Fold,” Cynthia said automatically, and then, more gently, “Now we’re going to learn what’s called the poker face. You want to have the exact same face all the time, like a statue. That way you’re keeping the secret of what cards you have, until the end when it’s time to show.”

But it ran against their nature. They scowled and groaned when the draw didn’t give them what they were hoping for, and they wiggled and widened their eyes when they found themselves with something good. Cynthia had so taken to heart the children’s generosity in suggesting that today they should all play what Mommy wanted to play that she couldn’t bring herself to just throw them the game. She wanted to even things out between them, not lose on purpose to keep them happy, or allow herself to win a few just to teach them another lame lesson about being a good sport. It wasn’t as though she was really taking their money. They were excited, and as long as the spell was unbroken the hours would keep marching smartly by and maybe tonight for once she wouldn’t already be staring at the front door when it opened and her husband came home.

So she sent April back to Adam’s dresser, to the top drawer this time, and April came back holding two red bandannas. Cynthia knew they were there because she’d used them to tie Adam’s wrists to the headboard, though that seemed like an awfully long time ago now. She called the kids in front of her chair and tied the bandannas around their faces so that everything below their eyes was draped like a bank robber. Then she sent them back to her bedroom to look at themselves in the full-length mirror, whence she soon heard screams of delight. Jonas ran back into the kitchen, pretending to shoot her.

“Stick ’em up!” he said.

“Back in your seat, there, pardner,” Cynthia told him. “If you want my money you’ll have to win it off me fair and square. Now, the name of the game,” she said, dealing, “is Jacks or Better.”

She ordered out for an early dinner-turkey sandwiches, chips, a bag of Milanos, even one small glass each of regular Coke, which they weren’t normally allowed to have. Anything to keep them at the table. The bandannas weren’t enough, because the kids’ expressive eyes still gave their hands away, so she went into the bedroom herself and came back with two pairs of sunglasses, her own and Adam’s, and balanced them on the children’s ears. They looked like little Unabombers, but at least now the playing field was somewhat level. They would never, ever fold, even after the principle had been explained to them more than once; but even so, at one point in the afternoon Cynthia was thrilled to discover that she was down three bucks to her children.

Then their attention began to waver. Jonas said he was bored, the word itself billowing out his red bandanna. April’s desire to keep her mother happy was much stronger, but she had started putting her head down on the table between hands.

“Can we go to the playground?” Jonas asked.

Cynthia glanced quickly at the air-shaft windows to confirm that it was still raining; then something made her look again, and she saw one of their neighbors-some old woman, she didn’t know who-standing at her own kitchen window, staring brazenly in at Cynthia and her incognito children, and scowling. What was worse, Cynthia saw, was that she was on the phone.

“Hey!” Cynthia said. She stood right up from the table and pulled open the kitchen window as far as it would go, which wasn’t very far owing to the child-safety guards. She bent from the waist and shouted sideways out the window. “Hey! What are you looking at?”

Emboldened by his mother’s high spirits, eager to jump to her defense whether he knew the source of the attack or not, Jonas ran up beside her, lifted the corner of his bandanna, and yelled out the window, “Yeah! What are you looking at?”

Cynthia turned; they stared at each other, and for a few seconds, in the wake of what would normally be considered a serious transgression, it was not apparent which way things would go. Finally she offered him a high five. “Darn right!” she said. “Nobody stares at our family!”

The woman in the window’s eyebrows seemed to jump, and she moved quickly out of their sight line. There were two windows in the kitchen: Cynthia opened the other one and both kids took up a position there.

“Go stare at somebody else, you old bat!” Cynthia shouted across the air shaft.

“Go stare at somebody else, you old bat!” the kids echoed, beside themselves.

“Mind your own beeswax!”

“Mind your own beeswax!”

Then Cynthia stood up on the windowsill and braced her hands against the frame. It wasn’t dangerous, she felt, though there wasn’t much between her and the air shaft now. April, too caught up in her mother’s euphoria to be scared herself, pulled Jonas up on the other sill and they stood there with their arms around each other’s waists.

“Our family rules!” Cynthia yelled, her breath fogging the glass.

“Our family rules!”

Then something flickered in the reflected light on the pane her nose was nearly touching; she turned her head and there, in the kitchen doorway, was Adam. He still had his dripping raincoat on. There was no telling how much he’d heard but his head was cocked warily, like a dog’s. Cynthia hopped down to the floor, a little out of breath. The kids did the same and came and leaned against her on either side, still wearing their bandannas and sunglasses. Her nostrils flared with the effort not to laugh. She put her hands on their shoulders.

“Hello, dear,” she said in a bright voice. “The children and I have been gambling.”

After four years at Morgan Stanley, an operation so vast that Adam’s true bosses existed mostly on the level of gossip and rumor, a feeling of toxic stasis had begun to provoke him in the mornings when he arrived at work. It wasn’t all in his head; lately a number of his colleagues had been promoted over and around him, and when he asked about it at his review, the thing that kept coming up was that they may have been dullards and yes-men but they all had their MBAs. Why this should have impressed anybody was beyond him. In theory he could have taken a leave of absence and gone back to business school himself-lots of the firm’s junior employees did it at his age-but those people didn’t have children to support, and anyway Adam lacked the tolerance for the one step back that might or might not set up the proverbial two steps forward. He’d worked hard to get where he was and he couldn’t see giving up that ground voluntarily. The momentum of the business world was one-way only, a principle that should not be rationalized. He and Cynthia had a vivid faith in their own future, not as a variable but as a destination; all the glimpses New York afforded of the lives led by the truly successful, the arcane range of their experiences, aroused in the two of them less envy than impatience.